I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I gave it to you straight last summer when I told you that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee for president. And now I have even more awful, depressing news for you: Donald J. Trump is going to win in November. This wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full time sociopath is going to be our next president. President Trump. Go ahead and say the words, ‘cause you’ll be saying them for the next four years: “PRESIDENT TRUMP.”

Never in my life have I wanted to be proven wrong more than I do right now.

I can see what you’re doing right now. You’re shaking your head wildly – “No, Mike, this won’t happen!” Unfortunately, you are living in a bubble that comes with an adjoining echo chamber where you and your friends are convinced the American people are not going to elect an idiot for president. You alternate between being appalled at him and laughing at him because of his latest crazy comment or his embarrassingly narcissistic stance on everything because everything is about him. And then you listen to Hillary and you behold our very first female president, someone the world respects, someone who is whip-smart and cares about kids, who will continue the Obama legacy because that is what the American people clearly want! Yes! Four more years of this!

You need to exit that bubble right now. You need to stop living in denial and face the truth which you know deep down is very, very real. Trying to soothe yourself with the facts – “77% of the electorate are women, people of color, young adults under 35 and Trump cant win a majority of any of them!” – or logic – “people aren’t going to vote for a buffoon or against their own best interests!” – is your brain’s way of trying to protect you from trauma. Like when you hear a loud noise on the street and you think, “oh, a tire just blew out,” or, “wow, who’s playing with firecrackers?” because you don’t want to think you just heard someone being shot with a gun. It’s the same reason why all the initial news and eyewitness reports on 9/11 said “a small plane accidentally flew into the World Trade Center.” We want to – we need to – hope for the best because, frankly, life is already a shit show and it’s hard enough struggling to get by from paycheck to paycheck. We can’t handle much more bad news. So our mental state goes to default when something scary is actually, truly happening. The first people plowed down by the truck in Nice spent their final moments on earth waving at the driver whom they thought had simply lost control of his truck, trying to tell him that he jumped the curb: “Watch out!,” they shouted. “There are people on the sidewalk!”

Well, folks, this isn’t an accident. It is happening. And if you believe Hillary Clinton is going to beat Trump with facts and smarts and logic, then you obviously missed the past year of 56 primaries and caucuses where 16 Republican candidates tried that and every kitchen sink they could throw at Trump and nothing could stop his juggernaut. As of today, as things stand now, I believe this is going to happen – and in order to deal with it, I need you first to acknowledge it, and then maybe, just maybe, we can find a way out of the mess we’re in.

Don’t get me wrong. I have great hope for the country I live in. Things are better. The left has won the cultural wars. Gays and lesbians can get married. A majority of Americans now take the liberal position on just about every polling question posed to them: Equal pay for women – check. Abortion should be legal – check. Stronger environmental laws – check. More gun control – check. Legalize marijuana – check. A huge shift has taken place – just ask the socialist who won 22 states this year. And there is no doubt in my mind that if people could vote from their couch at home on their X-box or PlayStation, Hillary would win in a landslide.

But that is not how it works in America. People have to leave the house and get in line to vote. And if they live in poor, Black or Hispanic neighborhoods, they not only have a longer line to wait in, everything is being done to literally stop them from casting a ballot. So in most elections it’s hard to get even 50% to turn out to vote. And therein lies the problem for November – who is going to have the most motivated, most inspired voters show up to vote? You know the answer to this question. Who’s the candidate with the most rabid supporters? Whose crazed fans are going to be up at 5 AM on Election Day, kicking ass all day long, all the way until the last polling place has closed, making sure every Tom, Dick and Harry (and Bob and Joe and Billy Bob and Billy Joe and Billy Bob Joe) has cast his ballot? That’s right. That’s the high level of danger we’re in. And don’t fool yourself — no amount of compelling Hillary TV ads, or outfacting him in the debates or Libertarians siphoning votes away from Trump is going to stop his mojo.

Here are the 5 reasons Trump is going to win:

Midwest Math, or Welcome to Our Rust Belt Brexit. I believe Trump is going to focus much of his attention on the four blue states in the rustbelt of the upper Great Lakes – Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Four traditionally Democratic states – but each of them have elected a Republicangovernor since 2010 (only Pennsylvania has now finally elected a Democrat). In the Michigan primary in March, more Michiganders came out to vote for the Republicans (1.32 million) that the Democrats (1.19 million). Trump is ahead of Hillary in the latest polls in Pennsylvania and tied with her in Ohio. Tied? How can the race be this close after everything Trump has said and done? Well maybe it’s because he’s said (correctly) that the Clintons’ support of NAFTA helped to destroy the industrial states of the Upper Midwest. Trump is going to hammer Clinton on this and her support of TPP and other trade policies that have royally screwed the people of these four states. When Trump stood in the shadow of a Ford Motor factory during the Michigan primary, he threatened the corporation that if they did indeed go ahead with their planned closure of that factory and move it to Mexico, he would slap a 35% tariff on any Mexican-built cars shipped back to the United States. It was sweet, sweet music to the ears of the working class of Michigan, and when he tossed in his threat to Apple that he would force them to stop making their iPhones in China and build them here in America, well, hearts swooned and Trump walked away with a big victory that should have gone to the governor next-door, John Kasich.

From Green Bay to Pittsburgh, this, my friends, is the middle of England – broken, depressed, struggling, the smokestacks strewn across the countryside with the carcass of what we use to call the Middle Class. Angry, embittered working (and nonworking) people who were lied to by the trickle-down of Reagan and abandoned by Democrats who still try to talk a good line but are really just looking forward to rub one out with a lobbyist from Goldman Sachs who’ll write them nice big check before leaving the room. What happened in the UK with Brexit is going to happen here. Elmer Gantry shows up looking like Boris Johnson and just says whatever shit he can make up to convince the masses that this is their chance! To stick to ALL of them, all who wrecked their American Dream! And now The Outsider, Donald Trump, has arrived to clean house! You don’t have to agree with him! You don’t even have to like him! He is your personal Molotov cocktail to throw right into the center of the bastards who did this to you! SEND A MESSAGE! TRUMP IS YOUR MESSENGER!

And this is where the math comes in. In 2012, Mitt Romney lost by 64 electoral votes. Add up the electoral votes cast by Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It’s 64. All Trump needs to do to win is to carry, as he’s expected to do, the swath of traditional red states from Idaho to Georgia (states that’ll never vote for Hillary Clinton), and then he just needs these four rust belt states. He doesn’t need Florida. He doesn’t need Colorado or Virginia. Just Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And that will put him over the top. This is how it will happen in November.

The Last Stand of the Angry White Man. Our male-dominated, 240-year run of the USA is coming to an end. A woman is about to take over! How did this happen?! On our watch! There were warning signs, but we ignored them. Nixon, the gender traitor, imposing Title IX on us, the rule that said girls in school should get an equal chance at playing sports. Then they let them fly commercial jets. Before we knew it, Beyoncé stormed on the field at this year’s Super Bowl (our game!) with an army of Black Women, fists raised, declaring that our domination was hereby terminated! Oh, the humanity!

That’s a small peek into the mind of the Endangered White Male. There is a sense that the power has slipped out of their hands, that their way of doing things is no longer how things are done. This monster, the “Feminazi,”the thing that as Trump says, “bleeds through her eyes or wherever she bleeds,” has conquered us — and now, after having had to endure eight years of a black man telling us what to do, we’re supposed to just sit back and take eight years of a woman bossing us around? After that it’ll be eight years of the gays in the White House! Then the transgenders! You can see where this is going. By then animals will have been granted human rights and a fuckin’ hamster is going to be running the country. This has to stop!

The Hillary Problem. Can we speak honestly, just among ourselves? And before we do, let me state, I actually like Hillary – a lot – and I think she has been given a bad rap she doesn’t deserve. But her vote for the Iraq War made me promise her that I would never vote for her again. To date, I haven’t broken that promise. For the sake of preventing a proto-fascist from becoming our commander-in-chief, I’m breaking that promise. I sadly believe Clinton will find a way to get us in some kind of military action. She’s a hawk, to the right of Obama. But Trump’s psycho finger will be on The Button, and that is that. Done and done.

Let’s face it: Our biggest problem here isn’t Trump – it’s Hillary. She is hugely unpopular — nearly 70% of all voters think she is untrustworthy and dishonest. She represents the old way of politics, not really believing in anything other than what can get you elected. That’s why she fights against gays getting married one moment, and the next she’s officiating a gay marriage. Young women are among her biggest detractors, which has to hurt considering it’s the sacrifices and the battles that Hillary and other women of her generation endured so that this younger generation would never have to be told by the Barbara Bushes of the world that they should just shut up and go bake some cookies. But the kids don’t like her, and not a day goes by that a millennial doesn’t tell me they aren’t voting for her. No Democrat, and certainly no independent, is waking up on November 8th excited to run out and vote for Hillary the way they did the day Obama became president or when Bernie was on the primary ballot. The enthusiasm just isn’t there. And because this election is going to come down to just one thing — who drags the most people out of the house and gets them to the polls — Trump right now is in the catbird seat.

The Depressed Sanders Vote. Stop fretting about Bernie’s supporters not voting for Clinton – we’re voting for Clinton! The polls already show that more Sanders voters will vote for Hillary this year than the number of Hillary primary voters in ’08 who then voted for Obama. This is not the problem. The fire alarm that should be going off is that while the average Bernie backer will drag him/herself to the polls that day to somewhat reluctantly vote for Hillary, it will be what’s called a “depressed vote” – meaning the voter doesn’t bring five people to vote with her. He doesn’t volunteer 10 hours in the month leading up to the election. She never talks in an excited voice when asked why she’s voting for Hillary. A depressed voter. Because, when you’re young, you have zero tolerance for phonies and BS. Returning to the Clinton/Bush era for them is like suddenly having to pay for music, or using MySpace or carrying around one of those big-ass portable phones. They’re not going to vote for Trump; some will vote third party, but many will just stay home. Hillary Clinton is going to have to do something to give them a reason to support her — and picking a moderate, bland-o, middle of the road old white guy as her running mate is not the kind of edgy move that tells millenials that their vote is important to Hillary. Having two women on the ticket – that was an exciting idea. But then Hillary got scared and has decided to play it safe. This is just one example of how she is killing the youth vote.

The Jesse Ventura Effect. Finally, do not discount the electorate’s ability to be mischievous or underestimate how any millions fancy themselves as closet anarchists once they draw the curtain and are all alone in the voting booth. It’s one of the few places left in society where there are no security cameras, no listening devices, no spouses, no kids, no boss, no cops, there’s not even a friggin’ time limit. You can take as long as you need in there and no one can make you do anything. You can push the button and vote a straight party line, or you can write in Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. There are no rules. And because of that, and the anger that so many have toward a broken political system, millions are going to vote for Trump not because they agree with him, not because they like his bigotry or ego, but just because they can.Just because it will upset the apple cart and make mommy and daddy mad. And in the same way like when you’re standing on the edge of Niagara Falls and your mind wonders for a moment what would that feel like to go over that thing, a lot of people are going to love being in the position of puppetmaster and plunking down for Trump just to see what that might look like. Remember back in the ‘90s when the people of Minnesota elected a professional wrestler as their governor? They didn’t do this because they’re stupid or thought that Jesse Ventura was some sort of statesman or political intellectual. They did so just because they could. Minnesota is one of the smartest states in the country. It is also filled with people who have a dark sense of humor — and voting for Ventura was their version of a good practical joke on a sick political system. This is going to happen again with Trump.

Coming back to the hotel after appearing on Bill Maher’s Republican Convention special this week on HBO, a man stopped me. “Mike,” he said, “we have to vote for Trump. We HAVE to shake things up.” That was it. That was enough for him. To “shake things up.” President Trump would indeed do just that, and a good chunk of the electorate would like to sit in the bleachers and watch that reality show.

A masterpiece about Sicily, meditation on eternity, and an endlessly rich historical tapestry, meticulously composed in color and on 70 mm. Luchino Visconti based the picture on the Count Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s posthumously published novel, about a Sicilian prince at the time of the Italian unification, or Risorgimento, who steps away from power and influence because he realizes that the life he and his family have led is coming to an end, that he has to get out of the way for younger and more ambitious men like his nephew Tancredi. Visconti and his fellow screenwriters (there were four of them, including his frequent collaborators Suso Cecchi D’Amico and Enrico Medioli) took Lampedusa’s novel and fashioned a whole new work on a grand scale, an epic but of a very unusual type. Time itself is the protagonist of The Leopard: the cosmic scale of time, of centuries and epochs, on which the prince muses; Sicilian time, in which days and nights stretch to infinity; and aristocratic time, in which nothing is ever rushed and everything happens just as it should happen, as it has always happened. The landscapes, the extraordinary settings with their painstakingly selected objects and designs, the costumes, the ceremonies and rituals—it’s all at the service of deepening our sense of time and large-scale change, and the entire picture culminates in an hour-long sequence at a ball in which you can feel, through the eyes of the prince, an entire way of life (one that Visconti himself knew quite well) in the process of fading away. Like Contempt, The Leopard was initially overshadowed by the circumstances around it, namely, the casting of Burt Lancaster as the prince. Here in America, we saw the picture in a shortened and dubbed version (Lancaster was speaking English) that was a little unsatisfying: you could clearly see that the movie Visconti had intended wasn’t quite all there, and it was jarring to watch Lancaster speaking in his normal voice surrounded by Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale and Paolo Stoppa dubbed into American English. When I got to see the whole thing, I was astonished by the picture and by Lancaster, who gives all of himself to the role and to the world of the film. Visconti had wanted Laurence Olivier, and he was initially very curt with Lancaster, but the actor won him over and they became lifelong friends. I could go on and on about The Leopard. It’s a film that has become more and more important to me as the years have gone by.

Fiery and tempestuous, but devoted to their filmmaking, director John Cassavetes and actor Gena Rowlands are one of cinema’s great husband-wife partnerships, producing a string of collaborations of startling psychological intensity.

Before I met Gena, I was a bachelor going out and torturing people. I think that’s good for young people. When I saw her, that was it! The first time I saw her, I was with an actor, John Ericson, and I said, ‘That’s the girl I’m going to marry!’

Both attendees of the American Academy of Dramatic Art, but separated by a year in age, it wouldn’t be until they were a couple of years out of school that John Cassavetes began his ruthless pursuit of Gena Rowlands. The couple were like chalk and cheese; he a jealous romantic, she ferociously protective of her independence. The arguments were ground-shaking from the get-go, and would only escalate from there.

But theirs was a personal and professional relationship which lasted until Cassavetes’ death in 1989. As both their careers began to develop (hers as an actress, his as both an actor and, starting with his directorial debut Shadows (1959), as the founding father of American independent cinema), Gena became as much Cassavetes’ muse as she did his wife, each of them doing their best work when in each other’s tempestuous company.

I don’t think you can do serious work in television… I wanted to do other things, and there was a certain amount of opposition to this. It came down to the fact that they didn’t know me and I didn’t know them well enough.

After a series of re-shoots for Shadows left him $30,000 in debt, Cassavetes was in desperate need of some income if he was ever going to fund the film’s editing and 35mm blow-up costs. With Rowlands having extracted herself from a relatively lucrative contract with MGM on discovering she was pregnant with the couple’s first child, and Cassavetes having had few acting opportunities during the protracted production period of his first feature, the couple were in dire financial straits.

When the offer from a Universal executive came in to play Johnny Staccato, ‘television’s jazz detective’, the brunt of Cassavetes’ ego’s song-and-dance routine was saved for Gena: “Can you imagine that son of a bitch wants me to do a television series? What the hell do you think I’ve been working for? I’m an artist! I don’t do television series! What kind of crap is that? Go out and do something for the sponsor of deodorants? Am I insane?”

Of course, he had little choice but to accept. Despite directing five of the more interesting episodes in the widely syndicated series (and getting to work with Rowlands on one, the unremarkable ‘Fly Baby Fly’), Cassavetes quickly tired of the artistic constraints imposed by network television, publicly denigrating the show and attacking the sponsors in the hope of being fired. Or as he himself put it, “I went to New York and took pictures with child molesters then called their agent”.

Making A Child Is Waiting was like drowning painlessly. It was a slow death. Shadows kept haunting me all the time I was trying to make like this big Hollywood director… I’ve since learned I’m just not temperamentally suited to that kind of ball game… It’s hard to be on the outside, and yet that’s really where you want to be.

Cassavetes’ first opportunity to direct his wife on screen came with a project inherited from director-producer Stanley Kramer. It would be his first real stab at making a studio picture as director-for-hire, having dipped his toe the previous year with the more personally resonant (but likewise inherited) feature, Too Late Blues (1961).

His experience on A Child Is Waiting was an unmitigated disaster from day one. Cassavetes clashed with just about everyone involved, taking pleasure in winding up screenwriter Abby Mann (who hung around the set to ensure the director didn’t change a word of his dialogue) and provoking his anxious and volatile star, Judy Garland. When both Cassavetes and Garland had to be physically restrained during a particularly frenzied bout of disagreement, Burt Lancaster stepped in to take his co-star’s side against the filmmaker.

With Rowlands in only a minor role, he had no real allies left, the last straw coming during post-production. For him, the primary focus of the picture had always been the children at the heart of the story, not the adult leads. Stanley Kramer saw things differently. When Cassavetes attended the first screening of the film for the executives at MGM, he discovered that Kramer had completely re-edited it behind his back to amplify the sentimentality. “Take my name off the picture”, said Cassavetes as he stormed out of the screening room. Then he smacked Kramer in the mouth for good measure. For the time being, the director’s Hollywood career was over.

When I decided to write and shoot it, I came home and said to Gena, ‘Are you willing to go without all the luxuries for the next couple of years so we can put everything we’ve got into the picture?’ She said, ‘Yes – except for getting my hair done. I insist on that!’

With his bridges burned at the major studios, there was no way that Cassavetes was going to find traditional funding for what would become Faces. If Shadows was a rough-and-ready exercise in filmmaking on the run, a young filmmaker’s film about youth itself, then Faces would be the first to define Cassavetes’ mature style, an examination of love, middle age and the politics of male-female communication that would extend into his next feature, Husbands (1970) and beyond.

Using his salary from a short-lived day job at Screen Gems (coming up with ideas for new TV shows that were never commissioned) and the fee from an unproduced script he wrote for Don Siegel, Cassavetes moved ahead with the unheard-of-at-the-time idea of an entirely self-financed production. Favours were called in at every opportunity, from the use of friends’ and family’s homes for locations to the use of Haskell Wexler’s camera. A young Steven Spielberg worked as an unpaid runner, while the milkman was given a promise of the share in any profits when Cassavetes couldn’t afford to pay his bill.

Refusing to work to any form of schedule or budget, Cassavetes let the production evolve organically, giving his company of actors whatever time they needed to find their way into character, shutting production down whenever rewrites or extra rehearsals were required. Rowlands would give the first of six extraordinary performances in her husband’s work, despite later describing the shoot as the most difficult she’d ever undertaken. With Rowlands pregnant at the time with daughter Xan, Cassavetes’ insistence on goading her through multiple takes took its toll and tensions between the two ran high.

Finally printing over 115 hours of 16mm stock (paid for through several remortgages of his and Rowlands’ home), Cassavetes would spend 30 months in post-production, shaping the film into what would ultimately become the director’s first masterpiece.

Directing is really a full-time hobby with me. I consider myself an amateur filmmaker and a professional actor. I’m a professional actor out of defence. I’d prefer to be an amateur actor. But I’ve got to have money to make films. Unfortunately, it’s an extremely expensive hobby.
Despite his protestations of professionalism as an actor, Cassavetes could prove as tricky a customer for those directing him as he could for those he directed in his own projects. More often than not, disagreements were borne out of the actor’s strong-mindedness rather than outright contempt (although Roman Polanski, who directed him in Rosemary’s Baby, may beg to differ), but one need only watch a few of his actor-for-hire roles to witness varying levels of engagement.

One thing on which Cassavetes could always be relied however, was convincing producers to hire his actor pals alongside him. Offering an atypical role for Peter Falk and a film-stealing one for Rowlands (as well as minor parts for Faces’ Val Avery and Jack Ackerman), Machine Gun McCain proves a lean, energetic slice of genre filmmaking from Italian director Giuliano Montaldo. Never one to miss an opportunity, Cassavetes’ greatest coup surfaced over dinner one night with the film’s producer, an Italian millionaire by the name of Count Ascanio Bino Cicogna. His fee for those weeks on Machine Gun McCain may have helped him finish editing Faces, but with wine and charm in plentiful supply that night, it was that dinner which got him his funding for Husbands.

To understand the story of Minnie and Moskowitz and the relationship of the title characters through their fights, arguments, pounding on doors, the torture, the pain, the screaming and the eventual marriage, it is essential for the audience to take itself back to when it cared. The romance takes place in a time before intellect.

An oft-overlooked gem in his filmography, Cassavetes took a cautious step back into studio filmmaking with Minnie and Moskowitz, taking advantage of Universal’s commitment to fund a series of low-budget features in the wake of the success of the likes of Easy Rider (1969). Racing through pre-production, he took a similar approach here as he did on Faces, filling the cast with friends and family members and taking over their homes to fulfil his location requirements.

With many aspects of the relationship between the protagonists mirroring his own with Rowlands, Cassavetes filled the screenplay with autobiographical references, and in casting his friend Seymour Cassel opposite his wife, ensured that the off-screen frictions that existed between the pair would colour their onscreen dynamics. He did everything he could to keep tensions high, sometimes marching a terrified Cassel into Rowlands’ bedroom when she was sound asleep to insist on an immediate rehearsal that he pretended Cassel was demanding. If this wasn’t enough to rile her up, he’d begin laying into her performance to create an exasperated energy she could carry with her into the scene. Always prepared to coax, trick and tease emotion out of his cast, the final interpretations always rested with the actors themselves, with the multiple takes upon which he insisted allowing him to shape the material to his liking at a later date.

If his tentative return to the studio fold with Minnie and Moskowitz led to a much less protracted pre-production process than usual, it wasn’t to last. Unhappy with the way the film was eventually marketed, Cassavetes gave a disastrous interview to Playboy magazine accusing the Universal executives of incompetence. Plans for a low budget, multi-picture deal that had been mooted until then instantly went up in smoke.

[Gena and I] were talking about how difficult love was and tough it could be to make a love story about two people who were completely different culturally, coming from two different family groups that were diametrically opposed and yet still regarded each other very highly… Gena and I are absolutely dissimilar in everything we think, do and feel. Beyond that, men and women are totally different. When I started writing the script, I kept these things in mind and didn’t want the love story easy. I made a lot of discoveries about my own life.

Considered by many to be his crowning achievement, Cassavetes conceived A Woman under the Influence as a gift for Gena. Unable to find funding for its initial life as a stage play, the start-up money was split with Peter Falk, who was insistent on playing the male lead. But it still wasn’t enough to move forward. Hoodwinking the American Film Institute into hiring him as a filmmaker-in-residence, Cassavetes gained access to all their equipment in return for leading some classes in filmmaking. What this effectively meant in practice was that Cassavetes now had a crew for the feature, made up of eager students (including cinematographer Caleb Deschanel), none of whom he’d need to pay.

Financial difficulties on the film were legion, but once again he refused to be dictated by anything resembling a schedule. If a scene took a week to shoot, so be it. Many cast members spoke of a familial atmosphere on the set during production, but more so than ever Cassavetes refused to make things easy for Gena. Rowlands gives one of the greatest screen performances in cinema (although she lost out on the Oscar to Ellen Burstyn in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore), but Cassavetes’ direction (or often lack thereof) could be brutal. Knowing exactly how to push her buttons, his tactics could be seen as tantamount to psychological abuse; mocking, taunting and wearing her down to elicit reactions that could work for the character.

Casting her real-life mother to play that of her character’s proved another unbalancing device, an off-screen relationship Cassavetes wasn’t shy in attempting to manipulate for the needs of the film. Gena knew what he was doing, but it was only in retrospect that she was able to look back on the situation with any real sense of perspective: “John encouraged you to the point that you pushed yourself into areas you feared with other directors”. While Cassavetes would take greater stylistic leaps with Opening Night and Love Streams (1984), in many respects A Woman under the Influence remains his quintessential work, the apotheosis of his working relationship with his wife and muse.

The actor can’t deliver in this situation. Hollywood directors create this situation. They make it possible for the actor to give nothing.

A quickie acting gig for the couple which (financial benefits aside) offered thankless roles for both, Two-minute Warning was shot during the latter post-production stages of Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976). Helmed by veteran TV director Larry Peerce, it’s a ploddingly orchestrated affair that adheres to the then-popular disaster movie template, introducing a slew of one-dimensional characters only to have them picked off one by one by a motivationally-confused sniper at a football game.

Perhaps most surprising was Cassavetes’ willingness to share the screen with an awkwardly bewigged Charlton Heston, given the pair’s fractious history. Back when the Academy Award nominations were announced in 1969, Faces picked up three. Cassavetes received a call from Screen Actors’ Guild president Heston, threatening the director with expulsion from the Guild and a hefty lawsuit for not abiding by its salary or contract regulations during production. He’d contacted the filmmaker earlier to initially press the issue, insisting dues be paid from any eventual profits the film made. The furious Cassavetes’ response was typical. “Sue me” he said, refusing to attend the ceremony at which Faces went home empty-handed.

When I am the director and Gena is acting, disagreement is not a bad thing. It’s really interesting. You don’t want an actor who is always polite and serious. You need someone who gets angry. They call me at five in the morning to insult me and that’s normal… That’s what life is about – for living through problems and for sharing them, isn’t it?

Inspired by the likes of All about Eve (1950) and A Star Is Born (1954; the 1976 Barbara Streisand version of which he turned down the opportunity to direct with an alleged “Why would I want to direct you?”), Cassavetes’ backstage drama is his most female-centric work, literalising his career-long thematic concern with performance via an examination of age, insecurity and celebrity. While much of the screenplay evolved out of discussions with Rowlands, whose experiences with an often hysterical public after the release of A Woman under the Influence mirrored those of her character Myrtle, Cassavetes also drew on his time directing the manically insecure Judy Garland in A Child Is Waiting.

Writing and conceptualisation proved a lengthy process, with Rowlands and Cassavetes often in disagreement on the shape the film should take; Gena favouring clarity, Cassavetes ellipsis, but the biggest battles were over the way the film dealt with the subject of ageing: “I softened the ageing theme because it was all very, very painful and the people I care about were upset by it. I mean Gena. But it wasn’t just that. I didn’t want the film to be too destructive”.

It was also the most technically challenging directorial assignment Cassavetes had ever given himself. Not only did it have the biggest cast he’d worked with, but the demands of filling a large part of a 2,000 seat auditorium for the performance scenes with SAG-approved extras took a sizeable chunk out of his tight budget. Luckily, the acting job that required him to explode for Brian De Palma (The Fury, 1978) ran over-schedule, meaning an extra $10,000 towards production costs. It went little way to helping him settle actor Joan Blondell however, who struggled with what she saw as Cassavetes’ unique approach to directing.

The film opened disastrously in America, Cassavetes swiftly deciding to pull the film from cinemas. It would be a long time before Opening Night would receive its due as one of the filmmaker’s finest achievements, and further evidence of Gena Rowlands as the greatest actress of her generation.

So they sent [the script] to Columbia, and a couple of days later [my agent] called and said, ‘I have some good news and some bad news. One, they like the picture very much and want to buy it. And they want to have Gena in the picture.’ And I said what’s the bad news. ‘The bad news,’ he said, ‘is they want you to direct it.’ So that’s where we started.

Cassavetes had no intention of directing Gloria, a script he’d knocked out in a couple of weeks to sell to MGM. But with Gena attached and time to work on some rewrites before Columbia eventually took the script instead, the money finally proved too good to turn down. Rowlands was sold on the idea from the outset, keen to take on a tough-talking, leading role that in some ways resonated with her long-held love for Marlene Dietrich.

It was unlike anything Cassavetes had ever undertaken before: a $4m budget; a large, professional crew; a strictly enforced sequential shooting schedule and no final cut. While the production went by smoothly enough, Columbia sat on the film for almost a year, convinced it wouldn’t prove profitable enough to market. They weren’t wrong. Despite winning Gena the best actress award at the Venice Film Festival, the film did middling business. Not that Cassavetes really seemed to care: “It was television fare as a screenplay but handled by the actors to make it better. It’s an adult fairy-tale. I always thought I understood it. And I was bored because I knew the answer to that picture the minute we began”.

I read the script. To my mind, it had nothing to do with Shakespeare – it was an interesting plot. It was complicated. And I thought it was a comedy, but I wasn’t quite sure.
Cassavetes was right, Paul Mazurksy’s Tempest has very little to do with Shakespeare beyond its most obvious allusions. He can also be forgiven his curiosity as to the film’s tone, as even 30 years on it remains difficult to judge. It does, however, feature Raul Julia as a Greek shepherd playing ‘New York, New York’ on his clarinet to a herd of flying goats. So there is that.

While Rowlands is given little of substance with which to work, Cassavetes turns in a surprisingly nuanced performance that belies his difficulties with Mazursky. I say ‘his difficulties with Mazursky’, but it was really the reverse that was more often the case. Up to his old tricks, Cassavetes was demonstrably uncooperative throughout filming, often point blank refusing to do what his director asked, once again teasing Gena almost to breaking point. The film itself remains something of a chore, its laborious direction something even a fully committed turn from Cassavetes couldn’t have fixed

That’s all I’m interested in, love. And the lack of it. When it stops. And the pain that’s caused by loss or things taken away from us that we really need. So Love Streams is just… another picture in search of that grail… or whatever.

Loosely based on the 1970 stage play I’ve Seen You Cut Lemons by Ted Allan, Love Streams is Cassavetes’ final masterpiece, sadly unavailable on any home video format. Both a stunning summation and exquisite farewell to everything that had come before in terms of his thematic concerns, it’s a final prayer for love and empathy, communication and understanding that centres on a brother and sister struggling to keep their grip on the very edges of their worlds.

Although he would go on to direct one more feature subsequently, Cassavetes was little more than a hired hand on the dreadful Big Trouble the following year, so the final shot of Love Streams presents an image of heartbreaking, seemingly prescient finality. Both Cassavetes and Rowlands give remarkable performances, hers sounding echoes of both A Woman under the Influence’s Mabel Longhetti and Opening Night’s Myrtle Gordon, his a hollow shell of Husbands’ Gus Demetri.

It’s a film that sees Cassavetes take an achingly poetic leap into new territory in its final third, his closing tempest making a mockery of Mazursky’s. The formal qualities of Love Streams show the filmmaker scaling new heights, and for my money it’s the pinnacle of his achievements as a filmmaker.